Social Network Analysis – Survivor: David vs Goliath Ep7

It’s the merge! The game starts here. It’s now time to see how strong the initial alliances are and where people stand. As always there are fractures within the original tribes and it doesn’t take long for them to be revealed in the first few votes.

Alison won the immunity challenge keeping her safe at tribal council. An envious position for the first vote of the merge. The votes were heading towards Angelina and Elizabeth however after a chaotic tribal all votes ended up with Elizabeth sending her home.

This week the graph has a change where each edge is the strongest link of that node i.e. the most times a castaway has voted with another rather than all. For example Christian has voted with everyone left on the island at least once but has voted with Gabby twice therefore that is the only link. As a result this frees up the graph and identifies more genuine links. Since the vote was unanimous there’s not a lot of new features. However it does continue to show the core group that have voted together. Alec has shown his intent to shake things up a bit and started building relationships with Christian, Gabby, Nick and Mike. I expect that is where we’ll see a divide in the graph. Lastly, Carl is still out there on his own and didn’t really form any strong relationships with the other castaways. Regardless he may have been the catalyst for voting Elizabeth out! After the next episode we can start making predictions.